David Lynch – RIP
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Filmmaker and cartoonist David Lynch has passed away.
David Keith Lynch
January 20, 1946 – January 16, 2025
The family, by way of social media, let the world know of his passing:
It is with deep regret that we, his family, announce the passing of the man and the artist, David Lynch. We would appreciate some privacy at this time. There’s a big hole in the world now that he’s no longer with us. But, as he would say, “Keep your eye on the donut and not on the hole.”
Any number of sources are reporting the death of the famous movie and TV writer/director. From Variety:
Director-writer David Lynch, who radicalized American film with with a dark, surrealistic artistic vision in films like “Blue Velvet” and “Mulholland Drive” and network television with “Twin Peaks,” has died. He was 78.
Lynch revealed in 2024 that he had been diagnosed with emphysema after a lifetime of smoking, and would likely not be able to leave his house to direct any longer.
After years spent as a painter and a maker of short animated and live action films, Lynch burst onto the scene with his 1977 feature debut “Eraserhead,” a horrific, black-humored work that became a disturbing fixture on the midnight movie circuit. His outré and uncompromising style quickly won the attention of the Hollywood and international movie-making establishment.
Cartoon Brew has more about Lynch’s early, and occasional return to, animation projects:
Filmmaker David Lynch has died, age 78.
He started in animation. His experimental student films made at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, like Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times) and The Alphabet (1968), were extensions of Lynch’s fine art, conceived as museum projections. The Grandmother (1970) took his medium into a hybrid of live-action, animation, painted and sculptured art.
Later, after five years in production at the American Film Institute’s Conservatory for Advanced Film Studies, Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977) burst onto the midnight movie circuit like a primal scream.
David Lynch was also an alternative comic strip cartoonist.
Volodymyr Bilyk at Interstellar-Superunknown details that part of his career:
The Angriest Dog in the World is a comic strip by American film director David Lynch. It is about the dog that is very-very angry because the world around is quite obviously unbearable and is completely unmitigated piece of undeniably stinking feces that is surprisingly undeservedly fecund for one activity relentless barking at the breaths end.
As the opening paragraph says: “The dog who is so angry he cannot move. He cannot eat. He cannot sleep. He can just barely growl. Bound so tightly with tension and anger, he approaches the state of rigor mortis.” (Imagine Don LaFontaine saying that.) David Lynch once explained the reasons behind the anger in the interview, he said: “That’s a mystery. Certain clues come from the world around him.”
The strip was conceived in 1973 when Lynch was in the midst of the shooting of Eraserhead film. Which was, for the lack of a better words, “tumultuous and conspicuously frustrating”.
Hopefully, around the same time, he discovered the joys of transcendental meditation and started to direct his obtuse frustrations and obvious desperations into a more creative direction. As he himself said: “I don’t know why I chose a dog. It has more to do with people and that the idea that anger is so intense… I was curious about anger. Once you’re angry, you’re really, really angry.” Thus came “The Angriest Dog in the World”.
It stayed a little personal venture for quite a long time before it first appeared in press in 1982 [some sources say 1983] in LA Reader. As Richard Gehr, the editor of LA Reader during that time, recalls: “David Lynch called up the editor James Vowell, and said, ‘Hi, I’d like to do a comic strip for you,’ and James wisely said, ‘OK.’ And David Lynch said, ‘Well, it’s kind of a weird concept. There’s only like one…part.’ And James said, ‘Well, OK, let’s see how it goes.’ “.
And so every week Lynch had called the editorial office and dictated “the script” to the editors. Then the editors would send “it” to the production department who would clean the balloons from the previous installment and write in the new ones.
The strip showed up here and there in various magazines and newspapers (including Dark Horse Comics’ Cheval Noir) over the years up until 1992. After that it continued to appear occasionally on Lynch’s official website before slowly slipping into complete oblivion. Currently it is merely a footnote in the Lynch’s oeuvre but undeservedly so as it is one of his most uncompromising and surprisingly relatable works.
Interstellar Superunknown has much more about the the strip and one of very places to post the strips in a size that doesn’t strain the eyes to read it (strips scanned from the Cheval Noir comic book).
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